Development of oral communication of hearing impaired children with hearing parents

Abstract

Based on the Idea that it is interacting with the hearing mother that a deaf child develops oral-vocal and gestural modalities of communication and in sequence to other studies where the author uses the same approach to the development of gestural communication of deaf children, the aim of this paper is to study the oral-vocal communication of four deaf children interacting with their hearing mothers. Adopting a socio-interacionist-constructivist approach,the author shows that, as in the gestures, in the construction of oral-vocal communication the same processes observed in the interaction between hearing mother and hearing child are observed. Through them the sound becomes hearing-visual and articulatory object, although only one of the subjects used the oral-vocal modality as the main way to communicate with the mother. In analyzing the oral-vocal productions of the children, the author discusses the role that entonation plays in the communication of deaf children and hearing mothers and the way the entonation is treated in the studies about the language of the deaf.